On the American response to the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion:

Teaser Intro

On September 5, 1968, just over two weeks into the start of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia that put a stop to the Prague Spring, Lyndon Johnson instructed his ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson to again seek the Soviet-American arms reduction summit that had been put on hold by the invasion. Images of Soviet tanks facing off against Czech demonstrators permeated the American media, and Congressional Republicans campaigned against Johnson's “weak” response to the invasion. And yet Johnson still hoped to hold a summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in October, the month before the national elections. As for the Czechoslovaks, Johnson had months ago decided that the fate of those fifteen million people should not dictate superpower politics and interfere with a summit that could help to bring an end to the nuclear arms race. Johnson had not protested Soviet obstruction of the Prague Spring prior to the invasion, and on the night of the invasion he anticipated that Washington and Moscow could simply overlook events in Czechoslovakia and still announce plans for the Soviet-American summit the very next morning.

Part 1: Before the Prague Spring

[Skip down to part III on the invasion if you do not care much about the background]

Years earlier, when Johnson first inherited the presidency from John Kennedy, he had announced his intentions to "build bridges" with Eastern Europe. These “bridges,” Johnson explained in a speech to cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, would consist “of increased trade, of ideas, of visitors, and of humanitarian aid.” Johnson argued that these bridges would allow Eastern European nations to develop individual identities and challenge Soviet domination of the region, while historians have noted that Johnson's purpose in building these bridges was to maintain stability in Europe while simultaneously weakening Soviet hegemony in its own sphere, an ambitious plan to force détente on the Soviet Union. Bridge building would ultimately flop, however, as the the combination of the Vietnam War and concerns over improving relations with the Soviet Union greatly overshadowed his pet initiative in Eastern Europe.

Initially, Czechoslovak interest in negotiating trade deals with the United States appeared promising to those tasked with developing Johnson's plan. Even before Johnson announced his bridge-building initiative, the State Department noted that Czechoslovak dissatisfaction with a stagnant economy and a failed economic model represented an opportunity for the United States to gain influence in Prague. . In November of 1964, Milos Vejvoda, the chief deputy of the Czechoslovak mission to the United Nations in New York, told his American counterpart that Prague supported “an active [American] policy of contacts with the east, especially through trade and cultural exchange.” Czechoslovakia, he explained, had become “disenchanted” with its “forward role” in the Eastern Bloc's economy and now wished to “look increasingly for trade relations with the West,” although Vejvoda warned that Johnson's desire to decouple Eastern European diplomacy from the Soviet Union represented a hurdle for improved US-Czechoslovak relations.

Johnson's government succeeded in building small bridges with the Czechoslovaks but failed to negotiate the big economic deals that Prague sought. To this end, the US government granted Social Security and other benefits to Czechoslovaks who moved back to Czechoslovakia and negotiated the Air Transport Services Agreement of 1969—all of which paralleled similar agreements made between the United States and the Soviet Union during the same period that Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko labeled “minor matters.” As for major economic agreements, the Johnson administration proved reluctant to promote bilateral relations with the Czechoslovaks at the expense of its more ambitious proposals to increase trade with the Eastern European whole. In November of 1965, after two years of rebuffing Czechoslovak proposals, Rusk explained to the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Duda that the political energy spent realizing Czechoslovak requests “would create an impediment to our broader policy objectives and to our intentions in the area of East-West trade.” Here Rusk referred to the centerpiece of Johnson's bridge-building initiative, the East West trade bill, which would have given the administration the authority to extend MFN status to any Eastern European nation that it chose, including Czechoslovakia (a bill that ultimately failed to pass through Congress).

While the East-West trade bill flagged in the Senate, the Johnson administration concluded negotiations for the Outer Space Treaty that prohibited the use of weapons in outer space and made significant gains in the negotiations over the NPT. At the start of 1967 [i.e., the year before the Prague Spring], Johnson took what he called the “logical and necessary next step” by refocusing his energy on bilateral arms-reduction talks with the Soviets. In the end, Johnson's bridge-building initiative proved to be a stopgap in his pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union. With the promise of improved bilateral Soviet-American relations in 1968, Johnson's efforts towards multilateral bridge-building with Eastern European subsided by the end of 1967 and no significant gains were made towards improving US-Czechoslovak relations. Ironically, LBJ's bridge-building initiative may have even harmed US-Czechoslovak relations. As the Ambassador to Czechoslovakia Jacob Beam explained, the Czechoslovaks, for whom the economy had become their principle political concern, responded poorly to Johnson's failure to secure MFN status for Czechoslovakia as he had originally indicated when announcing his bridge-building initiative.

Some historians have pointed to the rise of the Prague Spring, a movement that ostensibly fulfilled Johnson's goal of establishing anti-Stalinist governments in Eastern Europe, as an example of Johnson's bridge-building success, but no such link in fact existed between Johnson's bridge-building initiative and the Prague Spring. Intellectual opposition to Czechoslovak General Secretary Anatoli Novotny's rule emerged in 1956 in the wake of Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, well before Johnson's bridge-building venture began. In fact, analysts of the conflict between Novotny and the intellectuals make no mention of Johnson, nor does Alexander Dubcek in his memory of the dawning of reform. Moreover, had bridge-building proven successful, it may have even stalled the Prague Spring. Of the three recognized causes of Novotny's overthrow (the faltering economy, stagnant cultural life, and rising tensions between the Czechs and Slovaks), the Central Committee universally recognized the economy as the key problem for Czechoslovakia. Above all else, it was Novotny's failure to find a solution to this problem that assured that Alexander Dubcek, political ally of the influential economists of Prague, would usurp him. Rusk's State Department had criticized Johnson's bridge-building effort from its inception for exactly this reason: its success would have lent “support to these governments” that repressed Eastern European peoples “in a most Stalinist way.” Indeed, if any link existed between Johnson's bridge-building initiative and the start of the Prague Spring, it was in the failure of Novotny's government to capitalize on the American initiative.

Part 2: During the Prague Spring

In January of 1968, Prague's Central Committee altered American interests in Eastern Europe by replacing the Stalinist Novotny with the reform Communist Alexander Dubcek as Party Secretary. Dubcek’s appointment suggested that Czechoslovakia might independently bring about the kind of changes that Johnson had sought in Eastern Europe with his bridge-building initiative. Far from welcoming the Prague Spring as the fulfillment of his own vision, however, Johnson perceived the ensuing political battle waged between the Czechoslovaks and the Soviets as a “crisis” that threatened the “hope” bestowed by nascent détente. Over the next eight months, Johnson continued to pursue an arms reduction meeting while dismissing Soviet interference in the Prague Spring, and he made clear during the period of highest tension between Prague and Moscow that he would not involve the United States in the Eastern European affair. By the end of the Prague Spring, Johnson had secured a Soviet commitment to arms-reduction talks, a commitment that he maintained in the wake of the invasion and into the start of Nixon's presidency.

Continued below